


a world like no Other

by Truff



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Angst, Coraline AU, Fluff (eventually), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2020-01-07 01:51:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18400730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Truff/pseuds/Truff
Summary: Peter thinks he's seen all there is to see at Stark Tower. How wrong he is. (Coraline AU)





	1. Preface

**Author's Note:**

> yes i know the coraline au has been done like a bajillion times but eat my entire asshole cos coraline's been my favourite movie since it first came out. this is gonna be an AU where the other world is accessed thru stark tower (just go with it okay)
> 
> (inspired by 'the other' by sweetnesseverglory and 'button eyes' by evehist)

The doll came back through the window as it always did.

Floating lazily in a non-existent wind, it tumbled through the window back into the creature’s hands. Well, you couldn’t really call them hands, not if your definition of hands was headlined by the existence of sewing needles as razor-sharp fingers, connected seamlessly as if by some dark sorcery.

The doll was examined, turned over, and examined again. It resembled a young boy, short in stature and skinny in width, but with light brown threads atop its head and a hunting cap perched there too. It had several layers on, something that was painstaking to craft but _so_  worth it, and was armed with a cute little plastic potato-gun.

That potato gun had been useless in the end. What a shame.

Instantly, the sewing needles got to work. The clothing of the doll was snipped open by a gliding pair of scissors, and pulled off to be discarded to one side. The hair was pulled, thread by thread until the head of the doll was bare, and the black button eyes were pulled from their sockets. The mouth of the doll, previously sewn shut, was ripped from end to end and the soft cotton innards were removed where they cascaded to the floor.

New filling was added. Sand this time, poured through the mouth until each limb bulged and the doll’s stomach was filled to the right standard. Somehow, the doll turned out even skinnier than the last time, but that didn’t matter. New, darker threads were attached to the doll’s head and the creature marvelled at how they seemed to curl and bounce, as if the doll was actually alive.

The eyes were then added, a knitting needle poking through the fabric of the doll’s skin where the eye sockets were. Black button eyes were fine, though the spectre was sure that in time, the boy would change his mind as to what colour _his_  button eyes would be.

They always liked a choice.

A new t-shirt was crafted, one that had some sort of ridiculous joke plastered on the front. The creature didn’t care for jokes, not really, but if it helped the authenticity of the doll then there was no harm in adding it. Little denim jeans were crafted, just as carefully, and slid onto the doll’s legs.

The spectre had been sure to make every item of clothing _slightly_  too small, like the boy had outgrown them but continued to wear them for one reason or another. The doll had to be as true to life as possible if this was going to work.

Once finished, spindly hands picked up the doll to examine it once more. There was something to be said about how cute it looked, with its shiny button eyes and bouncing brown curls, and the spectre knew it had done well.

Muttering something incoherent, the creature released the doll into the sky, and from there the doll floated and tumbled and soared out of the window.

The spectre knew that it would be seeing the inspiration for the doll soon. It just took a little bit of time, that’s all.


	2. On a Tuesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> peter's first new discovery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wahey a real chapter. i've got like 3 WIPs at the moment, and a couple of unfinished edits, but my brain kept nagging me to write this. enjoy!

Peter discovered the door on a Tuesday.

When Peter had first started working with Tony Stark, he had no idea what he expected. A naïve part of him had imagined that he and the man would be in his workshop for hours on end, working together on the newest update of a suit, whether it was the spider suit or the Iron Man suits. He had imagined bantering, and joking, and maybe some looks that lasted a little too long for them to be simply platonic.

Instead, he was left to an empty lab with one note perched on the edge of a nearby desk.

_“Accords meeting. Back soon. – TS”_

Peter couldn’t really _blame_  Mr. Stark for his frequent absences. The whole Sokovia affair was something that couldn’t be fixed overnight, not if those meetings had Commander Ross in them. Ross was brutal and pedantic, and Peter had seen Mr. Stark traipsing back into the lab on multiple occasions grumbling under his breath about whatever it was that the commander had done that day.

The entire thing was a debacle that Peter simply watched from afar, although not entirely willingly. He had been put on the bench by Mr. Stark for a number of reasons: “Too young”, “World doesn’t know you’re Spider-Man”, yada yada yada. He had protested at first, but found that maybe it was best he didn’t get involved in intense foreign politics.

Instead, he spent the time in Stark’s lab, working on his Spider-suit. Upgrading his web slingers, making tweaks to Karen’s code, that sort of thing. When he was alone, like he was right now, he had strict instructions from Mr. Stark to not touch anything that wasn’t his.

Don’t touch this, don’t go there, don’t blow anything up.

Peter was getting bored of all these rules. So, he went exploring.

He had explored the workshop, and the corridors attached, countless times. It wasn’t Stark’s penthouse floor, that was strictly off limits to anyone but the man himself (or maybe Ms. Potts), but it did have some interesting stuff in. His favourite part of the floor was the display case of a few of Stark’s old suits. He knew that Mr. Stark had destroyed the vast majority of them, but had kept a couple like the Mark I and the Mark VII in display cases, completely powered down and unable to be “resurrected”, as it were.

Peter technically knew the floor inside out, could walk it backwards if he so chose, but he always enjoyed looking around it regardless. Today, he decided to re-visit the display cases. The Iron Man suits were a work of art, was it really that big of a deal that he wanted to admire them again?

And that was when he saw it.

A doll, tucked behind the display case.

Stark didn’t have any kids, and even if he did he _definitely_  wouldn’t allow them into his workshop… so what was a doll doing here? And why behind the display case, of all places?

It only got weirder as Peter got closer. He gripped the edge of the display case and shunted it towards him, which was an easy task given his enhanced strength. The doll flopped forward onto its stomach, its head turned to look Peter straight in the eye. The boy crouched down beside it, ever so slowly leaning forward to pick it up and look at it.

“What the…”

The doll… was him. Or rather, it _looked_ like him. Brown curls of threaded hair, shiny black button eyes and even his stupid ‘telekinesis’ pun shirt. Peter stared at it, and the doll seemed to stare back.

When he looked up, he saw that the doll wasn’t the only thing behind the display case.

A little panel, set into the wall that the case was positioned in front of. It wasn’t decorated, but there was a keyhole on the left hand side. Peter squinted at it, leaning forward to gaze carefully at the door. It seemed like he could fit through it on his hands and knees, if it could even open. He reached out to press his index fingertip against the keyhole, feeling it slowly, when-

“Kid! Kid, where are you?”

The sound of Mr. Stark’s voice carried down the hallway, scaring the living daylights out of the boy. He balked for a second, then scrambled to get up and shove the doll back behind the display case. Even though he knew it wasn’t alive, he couldn’t help but mutter a “Sorry!” as he watched it disappear between the case and the wall. He then ran out of the display room and back the way he came to the main workshop, where Stark was standing expectantly, holding… food?

“Ah, there you are. Sorry about making you wait, that meeting went on for far longer than I would’ve liked.” The older man huffed, moving over to the kitchenette area of the workshop. Peter hesitated, glancing over his shoulder down the corridor he had just come from, then followed the man to the kitchen counter.

“As I said, meeting took ages _but_  I managed to order in some of that Thai food you like.” Mr. Stark explained as he set the bags down on the counter. Peter took a deep inhale, and his stomach rumbled appropriately, causing the boy to blush and the man to chuckle.

“Mr. Stark, you really didn’t have to-“

“It’s fine, kid, honestly. Can’t have you starving to death while we’re still trying to sort out the depth perception of your suit, right?”

“Right, right.”

Once sat on the kitchen stool, Peter leaned forward to look through the plastic bags. He took out container after container, each with their own inscriptions of what was inside them, but his heart sank a little bit when he saw that Stark hadn’t ordered his favourite: duck mange tout. To be fair, he hadn’t really _asked_  him for it, but he couldn’t ignore the small pang of disappointment in his chest when he surveyed the boxes and saw no mention of duck on any of them.

Instead, he leaned forward and cracked open the container of vegetable tempura, spiking some of it with his fork and shovelling it into his mouth. He ate like a starving man, while Mr. Stark watched on with a mildly amused expression on his face. Neither of them said anything, though, and sat and ate in a companionable silence punctuated by small mutterings of “Can you pass…?” and “Can I have some…?”

After a few minutes, Peter finally decided to speak up.

“Hey, uh, Mr. Stark? How often do you visit your display cases, the ones with the Iron Man suits in them?” He asked after he swallowed down a mouthful of food.

“Uh, not very often. I mean, I made the suits so I already know what they look like. Those cases are just for other people to look through.” The man replied, watching Peter carefully while chewing on his food. “Why?”

“No… No reason. I, uh, was just wondering. So you don’t go in there at all?”

“Not really. It’s all for show, that stuff. Sentimental value, nostalgia, blah blah blah. Not much else.” Mr. Stark shrugged, leaning towards the boy to grab the container of food by his elbow.

The brush of contact against his arm was enough to make Peter flustered.

And that was another problem in itself.

Peter knew about Tony Stark from a very young age. Idolised him from the moment he saw that pixelated, crappy quality video from Afghanistan where the Ten Rings were demanding a ransom for his release. It may have been an odd point to start idolising him, but Peter saw something in the man’s eyes, a brutal determinism that shone through, and he _knew_ that the man was going to escape.

From there, the hero worship only got worse. When the Avengers successfully stopped Thor’s brother from invading Earth and Iron Man sacrificed himself to guide a missile through an alien wormhole, Peter was 11 and his eyes were so wide Aunt May insisted they were going to pop out of his head.

When he _met_  the man, he had hoped that maybe because he would get to see what Mr. Stark was actually like, the hero worship would fade and this perfect image of him in Peter’s mind would be replaced with a realistic view of him. That didn’t happen at all. Instead, Peter only became more infatuated, hanging off of the man’s every word and copying him in the workshop as best he could so that he could make something that even _slightly_  matched the man’s greatness and intellectual prowess.

After Germany, Peter had been given an access pass to Stark Tower and was told that he was welcome to visit any time he liked – under the condition that he used the front door and scanned in each time with his pass.

(One time, Peter chose to clamber in through the 67th floor window after his night patrol, and scared the living shit out of Mr. Stark who aimed an Iron Man glove at him the second he gracelessly hit the floor of the workshop.)

He took the man’s offer graciously, and spent every weekend with him tinkering the Spider suit, or offering advice on the next update of the Iron Man suits. Well. That’s what he would _usually_  be doing, if Stark wasn’t always at those dumb Accords meetings.

Anyway. The point was that in all of this, _despite_  all of this, Peter had fallen for the man _hard_. And there was no getting up, nor was there any point telling the man himself. He’d get laughed out of the workshop, and then he would never be able to show his face in the area, no, New York, ever again. There was no way in hell he was going to tell Mr. Stark about his… infatuation. So he sat in silence and suffered.

His train of thought was promptly derailed by the man in question clicking his fingers in front of his face.

“Spiderling? Hello? Did I lose you?” Stark asked, chuckling when Peter blinked owlishly and started paying attention again.

“Sorry, I just… got distracted. What were you saying?”

“I was wondering why you asked about the display cases.”

“Oh… nothing. No reason.” He said, returning his attention to his food. “I just… You don’t really tend to talk about it, so I was just curious.”

“Yeah, I only really stick to a few rooms in this place. I’ve forgotten where half of the doors on this floor go, honestly.” Stark said, laughing to himself.

“Right…” Well, that answered his next question about the door behind the display case. Peter wasn’t going to bring up the lifelike doll of himself, that would be _too_ weird. Besides, Stark would either brush it off or put the entire tower under lockdown, depending on what mood he was in, and Peter didn’t feel like calling May and explaining why he was under house arrest for the next 36 hours.

After that, Peter and Mr. Stark went back to talking about their usual topics. Bioengineering, Mr. Stark asking about school, Peter teasing the man about outdated references and Mr. Stark groaning because “I’m not _that_  old, am I?”. They settled back into their usual back-and-forth, but the knowledge of the door and the doll still sat heavy at the back of Peter’s mind.

A ringing noise interrupted Stark’s explanation of his nano-bot update, and the man frowned when he looked down at his phone.

“Awh, shit, kid. Apparently Commander Ross forgot to ask me about something in the meeting, so I gotta go downstairs. You’ll be alright here alone, right?”

Peter tried not to look too downtrodden, and nodded obligingly. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

“Good, good. Well, you know the rules. I’ll see you in a bit.” The man hopped off of his kitchenette stool and headed for the elevator, calling out over his shoulder as he walked. As Peter watched the elevator open and shut with Stark inside, he sighed.

But then he turned towards the corridor leading to the display case room.

It wouldn’t hurt to have a second look, right?

**Author's Note:**

> if i wanna write more, i'll write more
> 
> also [ follow me on tumblr ](trufaxz.tumblr.com) (trufaxz.tumblr.com if the hyperlink doesn’t work)


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